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NSF Report Flawed; Americans Do Not Believe Astrology is Scientific | NeoAcademic - 0 views

neoacademic.com/...elieve-astrology-is-scientific astrology science psychology survey method
shared by Javier E on 22 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • The problem with human subjects data – as any psychologist like myself will tell you – is that simply asking someone a question rarely gives you the information that you think it does. When you ask someone to respond to a question, it must pass through a variety of mental filters, and these filters often cause people’s answers to differ from reality. Some of these processes are conscious and others are not
  • Learning, and by extension knowledge, are no different. People don’t always know what they know. And this NSF report is a fantastic example of this in action. The goal of the NSF researchers was to assess, “Do US citizens believe astrology is scientific?” People were troubled that young people now apparently believe astrology is more scientific than in the past. But this interpretation unwisely assumes that people accurately interpret the word astrology. It assumes that they know what astrology is and recognize that they know it in order to respond authentically
  • When I saw the NSF report, I was reminded of my own poor understanding of these terms. “Surely,” I said to myself, “it’s not that Americans believe astrology is scientific. Instead, they must be confusing astronomy with astrology, like I did those many years ago.” Fortunately, I had a very quick way to answer this question: Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk).
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • MTurk is a fantastic tool available to quickly collect human subjects data. It pulls from a massive group of people looking to complete small tasks for small amounts of money. So for 5 cents per survey, I collected 100 responses to a short survey from American MTurk Workers. It asked only 3 questions:Please define astrology in 25 words or less.Do you believe astrology to be scientific? (using the same scale as the NSF study)What is your highest level of education completed? (using the same scale as the NSF study)
  • Among those that correctly identified astrology as astrology, only 13.5% found it “pretty scientific” or “very scientific”. Only 1 person said it was “very scientific.” Among those that identified astrology as astronomy, the field was overwhelmingly seen as scientific, exactly as I expected. This is the true driver of the NSF report findings
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Astrology: Why Your Zodiac Sign and Horoscope Are Wrong - 0 views

www.livescience.com/4667-astrological-sign.html astrology zodiac sign horoscope science Technology
shared by anonymous on 18 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Your zodiac sign corresponds to the position of the sun relative to constellations as they appeared more 2,200 years ago!
  • Astronomy can explain the position of the stars in the sky but it’s up to you to determine what, if anything, their alignment signifies
  • your zodiac sign is not what you think it is, and your corresponding horoscope can't be right.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • This means that the signs have slipped one-tenth—or almost one whole month—of the way around the sky to the west, relative to the stars beyond.
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Gamblers, Scientists and the Mysterious Hot Hand - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...d-the-mysterious-hot-hand.html pattern recognition brain science research psychology randomness
shared by Javier E on 18 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Psychologists who study how the human mind responds to randomness call this the gambler’s fallacy — the belief that on some cosmic plane a run of bad luck creates an imbalance that must ultimately be corrected, a pressure that must be relieved
  • The opposite of that is the hot-hand fallacy — the belief that winning streaks, whether in basketball or coin tossing, have a tendency to continue
  • Both misconceptions are reflections of the brain’s wired-in rejection of the power that randomness holds over our lives. Look deep enough, we instinctively believe, and we may uncover a hidden order.
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  • A working paper published this summer has caused a stir by proposing that a classic body of research disproving the existence of the hot hand in basketball is flawed by a subtle misperception about randomness. If the analysis is correct, the possibility remains that the hot hand is real.
  • We mortals can benefit, at least in theory, from islands of predictability — a barely perceptible tilt of a roulette table that makes the ball slightly more likely to land on one side of the wheel than the other
  • The same is true for the random walk of the stock market. Becoming aware of information before it has propagated worldwide can give a speculator a tiny, temporary edge. Some traders pay a premium to locate their computer servers as close as possible to Lower Manhattan, gaining advantages measured in microseconds.
  • Taken to extremes, seeing connections that don’t exist can be a symptom of a psychiatric condition called apophenia. In less pathological forms, the brain’s hunger for pattern gives rise to superstitions (astrology, numerology) and is a driving factor in what has been called a replication crisis in science
  • I know it sounds crazy but when you average the scores together the answer is not 50-50, as most people would expect, but about 40-60 in favor of tails.
  • There is not, as Guildenstern might imagine, a tear in the fabric of space-time. It remains as true as ever that each flip is independent, with even odds that the coin will land one way or the other. But by concentrating on only some of the data — the flips that follow heads — a gambler falls prey to a selection bias.
  • basketball is no streakier than a coin toss. For a 50 percent shooter, for example, the odds of making a basket are supposed to be no better after a hit — still 50-50. But in a purely random situation, according to the new analysis, a hit would be expected to be followed by another hit less than half the time. Finding 50 percent would actually be evidence in favor of the hot hand
  • Dr. Gilovich is withholding judgment. “The larger the sample of data for a given player, the less of an issue this is,” he wrote in an email. “Because our samples were fairly large, I don’t believe this changes the original conclusions about the hot hand. ”
  • Take a fair coin — one as likely to land on heads as tails — and flip it four times. How often was heads followed by another head?
  • For all their care to be objective, scientists are as prone as anyone to valuing data that support their hypothesis over those that contradict it. Sometimes this results in experiments that succeed only under very refined conditions, in certain labs with special reagents and performed by a scientist with a hot hand.
  • We’re all in the same boat. We evolved with this uncanny ability to find patterns. The difficulty lies in separating what really exists from what is only in our minds.
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The Smart Set: I Have My Reasons - May 24, 2011 - 0 views

www.thesmartset.com/...article05241102.aspx religion magic irrationality rationality
shared by Javier E on 09 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Wasn’t the Enlightenment supposed to wash the world of its sins of superstition and religion? And yet humanity keeps clinging to its belief systems, its religious leaders, and its prayer. More than that, we’re dipping back into the magical realms — one would think that if superstition were to be eradicated through the power of reason and rationality, magic would be the first to go. It turns out our hunger for the irrational and the intuitive is more insatiable than previously assumed. We have our Kabbalah, our Chaos Magick, our Druids. We have our mystics and tarot card readers and our astrologers on morning news shows explaining why Kate and William are a match made by the gods. Wicca is a fast growing religion in the United States, and my German health insurance covers homeopathy and Reiki massage, both of which have always felt more like magic than science to me.
  • And yet the atheists keep on, telling us that we don’t have to believe in God. It maybe never occurred to them that perhaps we want to.
  • Magical belief, whether that entails an omnipotent God who watches over us or the conviction that we can communicate with “the other side,” fills a need in us. Some of us, I should say, as atheists would be quick to counter. How seriously we take that belief, and what we do with it varies from person to person. As the debates between the godless and the faithful continue — and these are so prevalent in our culture now, the religious figure versus the atheist, sponsored by every university and cultural center, that I read such a debate in a novel I had picked up — that perhaps these two kinds of people simply have a different set of needs. It’s like a new mother arguing with a woman who has never felt maternal a day in her life. Neither side will ever truly understand the longings of the other, and the fact that they can’t stop arguing and trying to convince is proof of that.
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The Dangers of Pseudoscience - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...the-dangers-of-pseudoscience pseudoscience science demarcation
shared by Javier E on 11 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • the “demarcation problem,” the issue of what separates good science from bad science and pseudoscience (and everything in between). The problem is relevant for at least three reasons.
  • The first is philosophical: Demarcation is crucial to our pursuit of knowledge; its issues go to the core of debates on epistemology and of the nature of truth and discovery.
  • The second reason is civic: our society spends billions of tax dollars on scientific research, so it is important that we also have a good grasp of what constitutes money well spent in this regard.
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • Third, as an ethical matter, pseudoscience is not — contrary to popular belief — merely a harmless pastime of the gullible; it often threatens people’s welfare,
  • It is precisely in the area of medical treatments that the science-pseudoscience divide is most critical, and where the role of philosophers in clarifying things may be most relevant.
  • some traditional Chinese remedies (like drinking fresh turtle blood to alleviate cold symptoms) may in fact work
  • There is no question that some folk remedies do work. The active ingredient of aspirin, for example, is derived from willow bark, which had been known to have beneficial effects since the time of Hippocrates. There is also no mystery about how this happens: people have more or less randomly tried solutions to their health problems for millennia, sometimes stumbling upon something useful
  • What makes the use of aspirin “scientific,” however, is that we have validated its effectiveness through properly controlled trials, isolated the active ingredient, and understood the biochemical pathways through which it has its effects
  • In terms of empirical results, there are strong indications that acupuncture is effective for reducing chronic pain and nausea, but sham therapy, where needles are applied at random places, or are not even pierced through the skin, turn out to be equally effective (see for instance this recent study on the effect of acupuncture on post-chemotherapy chronic fatigue), thus seriously undermining talk of meridians and Qi lines
  • Asma at one point compares the current inaccessibility of Qi energy to the previous (until this year) inaccessibility of the famous Higgs boson,
  • But the analogy does not hold. The existence of the Higgs had been predicted on the basis of a very successful physical theory known as the Standard Model. This theory is not only exceedingly mathematically sophisticated, but it has been verified experimentally over and over again. The notion of Qi, again, is not really a theory in any meaningful sense of the word. It is just an evocative word to label a mysterious force
  • Philosophers of science have long recognized that there is nothing wrong with positing unobservable entities per se, it’s a question of what work such entities actually do within a given theoretical-empirical framework. Qi and meridians don’t seem to do any, and that doesn’t seem to bother supporters and practitioners of Chinese medicine. But it ought to.
  • what’s the harm in believing in Qi and related notions, if in fact the proposed remedies seem to help?
  • we can incorporate whatever serendipitous discoveries from folk medicine into modern scientific practice, as in the case of the willow bark turned aspirin. In this sense, there is no such thing as “alternative” medicine, there’s only stuff that works and stuff that doesn’t.
  • Second, if we are positing Qi and similar concepts, we are attempting to provide explanations for why some things work and others don’t. If these explanations are wrong, or unfounded as in the case of vacuous concepts like Qi, then we ought to correct or abandon them.
  • pseudo-medical treatments often do not work, or are even positively harmful. If you take folk herbal “remedies,” for instance, while your body is fighting a serious infection, you may suffer severe, even fatal, consequences.
  • Indulging in a bit of pseudoscience in some instances may be relatively innocuous, but the problem is that doing so lowers your defenses against more dangerous delusions that are based on similar confusions and fallacies. For instance, you may expose yourself and your loved ones to harm because your pseudoscientific proclivities lead you to accept notions that have been scientifically disproved, like the increasingly (and worryingly) popular idea that vaccines cause autism.
  • Philosophers nowadays recognize that there is no sharp line dividing sense from nonsense, and moreover that doctrines starting out in one camp may over time evolve into the other. For example, alchemy was a (somewhat) legitimate science in the times of Newton and Boyle, but it is now firmly pseudoscientific (movements in the opposite direction, from full-blown pseudoscience to genuine science, are notably rare).
  • The verdict by philosopher Larry Laudan, echoed by Asma, that the demarcation problem is dead and buried, is not shared by most contemporary philosophers who have studied the subject.
  • the criterion of falsifiability, for example, is still a useful benchmark for distinguishing science and pseudoscience, as a first approximation. Asma’s own counterexample inadvertently shows this: the “cleverness” of astrologers in cherry-picking what counts as a confirmation of their theory, is hardly a problem for the criterion of falsifiability, but rather a nice illustration of Popper’s basic insight: the bad habit of creative fudging and finagling with empirical data ultimately makes a theory impervious to refutation. And all pseudoscientists do it, from parapsychologists to creationists and 9/11 Truthers.
  • The borderlines between genuine science and pseudoscience may be fuzzy, but this should be even more of a call for careful distinctions, based on systematic facts and sound reasoning. To try a modicum of turtle blood here and a little aspirin there is not the hallmark of wisdom and even-mindedness. It is a dangerous gateway to superstition and irrationality.
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The Backfire Effect « You Are Not So Smart - 0 views

youarenotsosmart.com/...the-backfire-effect cognitive bias backfire confirmation bias social media individualized
shared by Javier E on 02 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • corrections tended to increase the strength of the participants’ misconceptions if those corrections contradicted their ideologies. People on opposing sides of the political spectrum read the same articles and then the same corrections, and when new evidence was interpreted as threatening to their beliefs, they doubled down. The corrections backfired.
  • Once something is added to your collection of beliefs, you protect it from harm. You do it instinctively and unconsciously when confronted with attitude-inconsistent information. Just as confirmation bias shields you when you actively seek information, the backfire effect defends you when the information seeks you, when it blindsides you. Coming or going, you stick to your beliefs instead of questioning them. When someone tries to correct you, tries to dilute your misconceptions, it backfires and strengthens them instead. Over time, the backfire effect helps make you less skeptical of those things which allow you to continue seeing your beliefs and attitudes as true and proper.
  • Psychologists call stories like these narrative scripts, stories that tell you what you want to hear, stories which confirm your beliefs and give you permission to continue feeling as you already do. If believing in welfare queens protects your ideology, you accept it and move on.
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  • Contradictory evidence strengthens the position of the believer. It is seen as part of the conspiracy, and missing evidence is dismissed as part of the coverup.
  • Most online battles follow a similar pattern, each side launching attacks and pulling evidence from deep inside the web to back up their positions until, out of frustration, one party resorts to an all-out ad hominem nuclear strike
  • you can never win an argument online. When you start to pull out facts and figures, hyperlinks and quotes, you are actually making the opponent feel as though they are even more sure of their position than before you started the debate. As they match your fervor, the same thing happens in your skull. The backfire effect pushes both of you deeper into your original beliefs.
  • you spend much more time considering information you disagree with than you do information you accept. Information which lines up with what you already believe passes through the mind like a vapor, but when you come across something which threatens your beliefs, something which conflicts with your preconceived notions of how the world works, you seize up and take notice. Some psychologists speculate there is an evolutionary explanation. Your ancestors paid more attention and spent more time thinking about negative stimuli than positive because bad things required a response
  • when your beliefs are challenged, you pore over the data, picking it apart, searching for weakness. The cognitive dissonance locks up the gears of your mind until you deal with it. In the process you form more neural connections, build new memories and put out effort – once you finally move on, your original convictions are stronger than ever.
  • The backfire effect is constantly shaping your beliefs and memory, keeping you consistently leaning one way or the other through a process psychologists call biased assimilation.
  • They then separated subjects into two groups; one group said they believed homosexuality was a mental illness and one did not. Each group then read the fake studies full of pretend facts and figures suggesting their worldview was wrong. On either side of the issue, after reading studies which did not support their beliefs, most people didn’t report an epiphany, a realization they’ve been wrong all these years. Instead, they said the issue was something science couldn’t understand. When asked about other topics later on, like spanking or astrology, these same people said they no longer trusted research to determine the truth. Rather than shed their belief and face facts, they rejected science altogether.
  • As social media and advertising progresses, confirmation bias and the backfire effect will become more and more difficult to overcome. You will have more opportunities to pick and choose the kind of information which gets into your head along with the kinds of outlets you trust to give you that information. In addition, advertisers will continue to adapt, not only generating ads based on what they know about you, but creating advertising strategies on the fly based on what has and has not worked on you so far. The media of the future may be delivered based not only on your preferences, but on how you vote, where you grew up, your mood, the time of day or year – every element of you which can be quantified. In a world where everything comes to you on demand, your beliefs may never be challenged.
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Is Science Kind of a Scam? - The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...spooked-books-adam-gopnik science knowledge physics einstein quantum facts social context history
shared by Javier E on 28 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • No well-tested scientific concept is more astonishing than the one that gives its name to a new book by the Scientific American contributing editor George Musser, “Spooky Action at a Distance
  • The ostensible subject is the mechanics of quantum entanglement; the actual subject is the entanglement of its observers.
  • his question isn’t so much how this weird thing can be true as why, given that this weird thing had been known about for so long, so many scientists were so reluctant to confront it. What keeps a scientific truth from spreading?
  • ...29 more annotations...
  • it is as if two magic coins, flipped at different corners of the cosmos, always came up heads or tails together. (The spooky action takes place only in the context of simultaneous measurement. The particles share states, but they don’t send signals.)
  • fashion, temperament, zeitgeist, and sheer tenacity affected the debate, along with evidence and argument.
  • The certainty that spooky action at a distance takes place, Musser says, challenges the very notion of “locality,” our intuitive sense that some stuff happens only here, and some stuff over there. What’s happening isn’t really spooky action at a distance; it’s spooky distance, revealed through an action.
  • Why, then, did Einstein’s question get excluded for so long from reputable theoretical physics? The reasons, unfolding through generations of physicists, have several notable social aspects,
  • What started out as a reductio ad absurdum became proof that the cosmos is in certain ways absurd. What began as a bug became a feature and is now a fact.
  • “If poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility, then science is tranquility recollected in emotion.” The seemingly neutral order of the natural world becomes the sounding board for every passionate feeling the physicist possesses.
  • Musser explains that the big issue was settled mainly by being pushed aside. Generational imperatives trumped evidentiary ones. The things that made Einstein the lovable genius of popular imagination were also the things that made him an easy object of condescension. The hot younger theorists patronized him,
  • There was never a decisive debate, never a hallowed crucial experiment, never even a winning argument to settle the case, with one physicist admitting, “Most physicists (including me) accept that Bohr won the debate, although like most physicists I am hard pressed to put into words just how it was done.”
  • Arguing about non-locality went out of fashion, in this account, almost the way “Rock Around the Clock” displaced Sinatra from the top of the charts.
  • The same pattern of avoidance and talking-past and taking on the temper of the times turns up in the contemporary science that has returned to the possibility of non-locality.
  • the revival of “non-locality” as a topic in physics may be due to our finding the metaphor of non-locality ever more palatable: “Modern communications technology may not technically be non-local but it sure feels that it is.”
  • Living among distant connections, where what happens in Bangalore happens in Boston, we are more receptive to the idea of such a strange order in the universe.
  • The “indeterminacy” of the atom was, for younger European physicists, “a lesson of modernity, an antidote to a misplaced Enlightenment trust in reason, which German intellectuals in the 1920’s widely held responsible for their country’s defeat in the First World War.” The tonal and temperamental difference between the scientists was as great as the evidence they called on.
  • Science isn’t a slot machine, where you drop in facts and get out truths. But it is a special kind of social activity, one where lots of different human traits—obstinacy, curiosity, resentment of authority, sheer cussedness, and a grudging readiness to submit pet notions to popular scrutiny—end by producing reliable knowledge
  • What was magic became mathematical and then mundane. “Magical” explanations, like spooky action, are constantly being revived and rebuffed, until, at last, they are reinterpreted and accepted. Instead of a neat line between science and magic, then, we see a jumpy, shifting boundary that keeps getting redrawn
  • Real-world demarcations between science and magic, Musser’s story suggests, are like Bugs’s: made on the move and as much a trap as a teaching aid.
  • In the past several decades, certainly, the old lines between the history of astrology and astronomy, and between alchemy and chemistry, have been blurred; historians of the scientific revolution no longer insist on a clean break between science and earlier forms of magic.
  • Where once logical criteria between science and non-science (or pseudo-science) were sought and taken seriously—Karl Popper’s criterion of “falsifiability” was perhaps the most famous, insisting that a sound theory could, in principle, be proved wrong by one test or another—many historians and philosophers of science have come to think that this is a naïve view of how the scientific enterprise actually works.
  • They see a muddle of coercion, old magical ideas, occasional experiment, hushed-up failures—all coming together in a social practice that gets results but rarely follows a definable logic.
  • Yet the old notion of a scientific revolution that was really a revolution is regaining some credibility.
  • David Wootton, in his new, encyclopedic history, “The Invention of Science” (Harper), recognizes the blurred lines between magic and science but insists that the revolution lay in the public nature of the new approach.
  • What killed alchemy was the insistence that experiments must be openly reported in publications which presented a clear account of what had happened, and they must then be replicated, preferably before independent witnesses.
  • Wootton, while making little of Popper’s criterion of falsifiability, makes it up to him by borrowing a criterion from his political philosophy. Scientific societies are open societies. One day the lunar tides are occult, the next day they are science, and what changes is the way in which we choose to talk about them.
  • Wootton also insists, against the grain of contemporary academia, that single observed facts, what he calls “killer facts,” really did polish off antique authorities
  • once we agree that the facts are facts, they can do amazing work. Traditional Ptolemaic astronomy, in place for more than a millennium, was destroyed by what Galileo discovered about the phases of Venus. That killer fact “serves as a single, solid, and strong argument to establish its revolution around the Sun, such that no room whatsoever remains for doubt,” Galileo wrote, and Wootton adds, “No one was so foolish as to dispute these claims.
  • everal things flow from Wootton’s view. One is that “group think” in the sciences is often true think. Science has always been made in a cloud of social networks.
  • There has been much talk in the pop-sci world of “memes”—ideas that somehow manage to replicate themselves in our heads. But perhaps the real memes are not ideas or tunes or artifacts but ways of making them—habits of mind rather than products of mind
  • science, then, a club like any other, with fetishes and fashions, with schemers, dreamers, and blackballed applicants? Is there a real demarcation to be made between science and every other kind of social activity
  • The claim that basic research is valuable because it leads to applied technology may be true but perhaps is not at the heart of the social use of the enterprise. The way scientists do think makes us aware of how we can think
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Hearing ghost voices relies on pseudoscience and fallibility of human perception - 0 views

theconversation.com/lity-of-human-perception-48160
shared by anonymous on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Hearing ghost voices relies on pseudoscience and fallibility of human perception
  • Nontrivial numbers of Americans believe in the paranormal.
  • Part of the attraction of the audio recorder for paranormal researchers is its apparent objectivity. How could a skeptic refute the authenticity of a spirit captured by an unbiased technical instrument? To the believers, EVP seem like incontrovertible evidence of communications from beyond.
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  • But recent research in my lab suggested that people don’t agree much about what, if anything, they hear in the EVP sounds – a result readily explained by the fallibility of human perception.
  • In some instances, alleged EVP are the voices of the investigators or interference from radio transmissions – problems that indicate shoddy data collection practices. Other research, however, has suggested that EVP have been captured under acoustically controlled circumstances in recording studios.
  • Research in mainstream psychology has shown that people will readily perceive words in strings of nonsensical speech sounds.
  • People’s expectations about what they’re supposed to hear can result in the illusory perception of tones, nature sounds, machine sounds, and even voices when only acoustic white noise – like the sound of a detuned radio – exists.
  • Interpretations of speech in noise – a situation similar to EVP where the alleged voice is difficult to discern – can shift entirely based upon what the listener expects to hear.
  • In my lab, we recently conducted an experiment to examine how expectations might influence the perception of purported EVP
  • So suggesting a paranormal research topic mattered only when the audio was ambiguous.
  • when people said they heard a voice in the EVP, only 13% agreed about exactly what the voice said. To compare, 95% percent of people on average agreed about what the voice said when they heard actual speech.
  • These findings suggest that paranormal researchers should not use their own subjective judgments to confirm the contents of EVP.
  • But perhaps most importantly, we showed that the mere suggestion of a paranormal research context made people more likely to hear voices in ambiguous stimuli, although they couldn’t agree on what the voices were saying.
  • pareidolia – the tendency to perceive human characteristics in meaningless perceptual patterns
  • There are many visual examples of pareidolia – things like seeing human faces in everyday objects (such as Jesus in a piece of toast).
  • Research from cognitive psychology has shown that paranormal believers may be especially prone to misperceiving chance events.
  • Another characteristic of pseudoscience is a lack of integration with related areas of inquiry. There is a rich history of using experimental methods to examine auditory perception, yet EVP enthusiasts are either unaware or willfully ignorant of this relevant work.
  • parsimony – the idea that the simplest explanation is preferred
  • we need a theory to account for how and why a human listener sometimes misperceives ambiguous stimuli.
  • In fact, this very tendency is one of many well-documented cognitive shortcuts that may have adaptive value. A voice may indicate the presence of a potential mate or foe, so it may be useful to err on the side of perceiving agency in ambiguous auditory stimuli.
  • Currently, there is only limited, tentative evidence to link exposure to pseudoscience on television to pseudoscientific beliefs. Still, one study showed that people find paranormal research to be more credible and scientific when it is shown using technological tools such as recording devices. Other evidence has suggested that popular opinion may outweigh scientific credibility when people evaluate pseudoscientific claims.
  • anonymous on 03 Nov 20
     
    Why do we hear voices or weird noises and think of spooky stories or ghosts? It all has to do with perception of the audible information we're taking in and how we've been influenced about this topic.
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Forer effect - The Skeptic's Dictionary - Skepdic.com - 0 views

skepdic.com/forer.html Forer effect confirmation bias cognitive biases
shared by mmckenziejr01 on 31 Oct 17 - Cached
  • orer eff
  • The Forer effect refers to the tendency of people to rate sets of statements as highly accurate for them personally even though the statements could apply to many people.
  • Forer gave a personality test to his students, ignored their answers, and gave each student the above evaluation. He asked them to evaluate the evaluation from 0 to 5, with "5" meaning the recipient felt the evaluation was an "excellent" assessment and "4" meaning the assessment was "good." The class average evaluation was 4.26. That was in 1948. The test has been repeated hundreds of time with psychology students and the average is still around 4.2 out of 5, or 84% accurate.
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  • In short, Forer convinced people he could successfully read their character.
  • his personality analysis was taken from a newsstand astrology column and was presented to people without regard to their sun sign.
  • People tend to accept claims about themselves in proportion to their desire that the claims be true rather than in proportion to the empirical accuracy of the claims as measured by some non-subjective standard.
  • The Forer effect, however, only partially explains why so many people accept as accurate occult and pseudoscientific character assessment procedures
  • Favorable assessments are "more readily accepted as accurate descriptions of subjects' personalities than unfavorable" ones. But unfavorable claims are "more readily accepted when delivered by people with high perceived status than low perceived status."
  • mmckenziejr01 on 31 Oct 17
     
    From the reading, the Forer effect seemed to be a good example of a couple cognitive biases together. The experiment and some of the findings are very interesting.
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'The Fourth Turning' Enters Pop Culture - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ourth-turning-pop-culture.html turning point history crisis culture book trend framework historiography cycles
shared by Javier E on 08 Jul 23 - No Cached
  • According to “fourth turning” proponents, American history goes through recurring cycles. Each one, which lasts about 80 to 100 years, consists of four generation-long seasons, or “turnings.” The winter season is a time of upheaval and reconstruction — a fourth turning.
  • The theory first appeared in “The Fourth Turning,” a work of pop political science that has had a cult following more or less since it was published in 1997. In the last few years of political turmoil, the book and its ideas have bubbled into the mainstream.
  • According to “The Fourth Turning,” previous crisis periods include the American Revolution, the Civil War and World War II. America entered its latest fourth turning in the mid-2000s. It will culminate in a crisis sometime in the 2020s — i.e., now.
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  • One of the book’s authors, Neil Howe, 71, has become a frequent podcast guest. A follow-up, “The Fourth Turning Is Here,” comes out this month.
  • The play’s author, Will Arbery, 33, said he heard about “The Fourth Turning” while researching Stephen K. Bannon, the right-wing firebrand and former adviser to President Donald J. Trump, who is a longtime fan of the book and directed a 2010 documentary based on its ideas.
  • He described it as “this almost fun theory about history,” but added: “And yet there’s something deeply menacing about it.”
  • Mr. Arbery, who said he does not subscribe to the theory, sees parallels between the fourth turning and other nonscientific beliefs. “I modeled the way that Teresa talks about the fourth turning on the way that young liberals talk about astrology,” he said.
  • The book’s outlook on the near future has made it appealing to macro traders and crypto enthusiasts, and it is frequently cited on the podcasts “Macro Voices,” “Wealthion” and “On the Margin.”
  • In the new book, he describes what a coming civil war or geopolitical conflict might look like — though he shies away from casting himself as a modern-day Nostradamus.
  • “The Fourth Turning” captured a mood of decline in recent American life. “I remember feeling safe in the ’90s, and then as soon as 9/11 hit, the world went topsy-turvy,” he said. “Every time my cohort got to the point where we were optimistic, another crisis happened. When I read the book, I was like, ‘That makes sense.’”
  • “The Fourth Turning” was conceived during a period of relative calm. In the late 1980s, Mr. Howe, a Washington, D.C., policy analyst, teamed with William Strauss, a founder of the political satire troupe the Capitol Steps.
  • Their first book, “Generations,” told a story of American history through generational profiles going back to the 1600s. The book was said to have influenced Bill Clinton to choose a fellow baby boomer, Al Gore, as his running mate
  • when the 2008 financial crisis hit at almost exactly the point when the start of the fourth turning was predicted, it seemed to many that the authors might have been onto something. Recent events — the pandemic, the storming of the Capitol — have seemingly provided more evidence for the book’s fans.
  • Historically, a fourth turning crisis has always translated into a civil war, a war of great nations, or both, according to the book. Either is possible over the next decade, Mr. Howe said. But he is a doomsayer with an optimistic streak: Each fourth turning, in his telling, kicks off a renaissance in civic life.
  • “I’ve read ‘The Fourth Turning,’ and indeed found it useful from a macroeconomic investing perspective,” Lyn Alden, 35, an investment analyst, wrote in an email. “History doesn’t repeat, but it kind of gives us a loose framework to work with.”
  • “This big tidal shift is arriving,” Mr. Howe said. “But if you’re asking me which wave is going to knock down the lighthouse, I can’t do that. I can just tell you that this is the time period. It gives you a good idea of what to watch for.”
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